Freedom From Want

A beaming grandmother sets a golden roast turkey before a table of happy, chattering family members, the white cloth and glassware gleaming in clear light. Norman Rockwell painted Freedom from Want as one of his Four Freedoms, illustrating the ideals President Roosevelt named, and it became a wartime emblem of American abundance and togetherness. Now in the Norman Rockwell Museum, it is among the most familiar of all American images - a Thanksgiving idyll, warm and idealized, that has been endlessly reproduced and parodied as the very picture of national plenty and domestic happiness.